Theme 3: Language and expression in digital spaces

This theme focuses on language as social practice. Work reviewed here traces how digitally mediated interaction has evolved from text-heavy forums and email to multimodal, platformed environments, and examines how people use linguistic and semiotic resources to perform identity, manage stance, and coordinate participation.

Pre-2004, research documented distinctive features of computer-mediated interaction–often positioned between oral and written modalities–showing how users discursively constructed identities through text and emergent conventions, with hypertext enabling associative navigation (Macfadyen et al., 2004). Alongside these advances, scholars noted concerns: early anxieties about English as an internet lingua franca, inequitable access, and the ambiguities of relatively disembodied interaction.